Text - Carbon Obscura -Structure Place & Space - 2007 - © Lloyd Godman

Making Light with Carbon Magic

“Carbon Obscura”, installation by Lloyd Godman set in the greenhouse at Monsalvat as part of Structure, Space and Place Installations in Nullimbik May 2007 curated by Tony Trembath

Light, science and art are intertwined in a magical way in Carbon Obscura, an innovative installation that references nature in a greenhouse at Montsalvat, the historic artist colony on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Godman has altered the walls and ceiling of this small Monsalvat greenhouse, covering the glass panels with black carbon paper into which he has depicted a horizon of trees by punching a series of small holes into the thin carbon surface. References abound to proto-photography and apertures that allow light to enter darkened spaces such as cameras, or rooms, as in the cinema. In Carbon Obscura such holes let in multiple rays of daylight which, when combined with water vapour from a smoke machine triggered on entering the space, enables a magical play of light that joins the dots to form a picture that is at the heart of this experience. Darkened greenhouse becomes virtual camera obscura, black void, a cinematic experience but one which allows different perspectives as we move in the space. The dark interior, like that of the cinema, transports us to another realm, where we engage with the phenomenology of light, not just any light but a three dimensional streaming spectre of trees. We are bathed in this swirling, misty light and become one with it. The intimate space is a reverie of nature filled with ethereal rays of light, casts a spiritual dimension that resonates like a kinetic black and white stained glass window. The immateriality of light takes on material form like a swirling mist on a cold frosty morning or smoke from a forest on fire.

Carbon Obscura is a kinetic and optical installation with a charge of elemental force. Godman employs daylight as the immaterial centrepiece of this installation. Its magical force, at once both real and perceptual, is a photo-kinetic experience that combines the virtual with the spiritual. Though the quality of light changes according to time of day and effects of the weather, bright sunlight and moisture in the form of water vapour provide the peak experience.

References to light-sensitivity abound, the dramatic role of light, the influence of early photography, references to the camera obscura and the pinhole camera. The installation is made up of light but this light is not captured by the camera via an aperture in a lens or a pinhole to make a photograph. Instead of one aperture there are thousands. It is a kind of photography, a drawing with light at its most fundamental. The substitution of carbon in place of camera obscura in the title enables Godman to move beyond the sphere of photographic representation to the pressing subject of energy resources. He embraces the challenge of climate change and the role played by high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The work highlights the role of trees in the reduction of these greenhouse gasses.

It is no coincidence that this installation is situated in a greenhouse. Godman references the greenhouse effect and employs the conditions necessary for organic growth – light, water and vapour both directly and through metaphor.
Unlike the aperture in a pinhole or a lens, each hole in the carbon paper does not bring a tiny upside-down image of the outside world into the intimacy of this greenhouse, they do however project the luminance values from the world outside via thousands of tiny circles of confusion that light up the darkened space of the interior with a semblance of the real trees as they move in sympathy with the wind and the sun, with nature. The passing of time and the constantly changing light allows for new engagements with the nuances of this experience. However Godman’s punched holes combine to form a much bigger story, that of a curved horizon of trees.

The installation embraces photography’s beginnings, that go way back to times before Fox Talbot and Daguerre, back to Aristotle and even earlier to suggestions that the first camera obscura was in fact an Arabic tent with a small round hole, a rip, that acted as an aperture to project the light of the world outside into the darkened interior making upside down images. Carbon Obscura also references the Kinetic art and Op art movements of the 1960’s that are now being rediscovered, even reinvented, in many current media and virtual artworks in the form of immersion in projected light and interactive experience.

The twinkling effect of the light comes from the trees outside the greenhouse and happens as light bounces off the shiny leaves on these real trees. The twinkling becomes kinetic shimmer, light appears to be alive, dots are joined as picture dissolves into illusion and illusion turns into an occasion. Virtual trees appear to be immaterial and float on a vapour of water. We are simultaneously provoked and enchanted, bathed in the light of these magic trees. We ’catch’ the light as exposure dawns on us; we become part of the installation, one with the light, as we dissolve into phenomenological comprehension.

Yet this is an experience that evolves over time, our active position inside the obscura allows for participation, to transcend the sublime and play an active part in the unfolding of this dream-like art experience. Can active participation in an experience overcome passive observation? The experience of simultaneously being both inside the carbon obscura and outside in the natural world of elemental light and organic life is powerful. The horizon of trees becomes its own message. We become unstilled by this experience. A space opens for re-embodiment beyond contemplation that is active, even political, and allows for mediation between nature and the language of culture. The title of this work references the (camera) obscura in order to prompt questions - “What kind of experience is this?” “Can photography, video or digital projection have no machine, no technological source?” Closure is denied, there is no reconciliation of time over space, only our participation shines through this experience to alert us to carbon dioxide, climate change and the vital role that trees can play.

Carbon, not light, is the real subject of this work.

Lloyd Godman has expanded his environmental praxis, one that has spanned many photographic exhibitions and installations using light projections and photosensitivity. Carbon Obscura, becomes its own message, one that is powerfully communicated through the magic and wonderment of a phenomenological experience. We become captivated by this moment of connection with the forces of the universe, a spiritual reconciliation with the organic wonder of nature – the trees outside the greenhouse became light-filled images of idealized trees, spectres, hauntings, streaming ghosts of a future that will shortly be lost unless we take some action. Herein lies Godman’s message – the dreamlike qualities of the installation work on our senses to teleport us to action. They fire up our neural networks to never forget the experience. The wonder brings a shift in experience of the greenhouse effect outside the nurturing climate of the greenhouse of the installation. The simple eloquence of this installation comprising carbon paper, daylight and water vapour evokes a charge that goes beyond representation. We enter the greenhouse; it is hot and sweaty, filled with the rising vapours of gas, of clouds. Carbon Obscura uses the intensity of art to urgently question our relationship to the world outside the darkened room. As such it is an oblique call to arms on climate change, a unique artwork, an alchemical process, an unforgettable experience.

Carolyn Lewens 2007

The Force that Feeds Us

Like the form of a body unclothed, light is quintessential, in every manifestation elegance is drawn from a dark void.

Photographers are acquiescent to this ultimate force. From a profusion of energy speeding past a planet suspended in a vast space, these small, humble creatures - photographers - use recording devices to capture infinitesimal degrees of electromagnetic radiation and create images of their world. There is ritual in their methods - of looking at light, of waiting for light, of chasing light, of constructing with light – and even cursing the light. Their medium demands looking critically with an eye of sensitivity to the force that propels the medium.

Photo-archetype relies on light - images are formed by modulations of light that project onto the sensitive emulsion or receiver. While each image carries a presence of light related to the subject, there is a correspondence to the absence of light that was absorbed- retained by the subject, or reflected faster than a bullet into an adjacent space - this is what forms a recognizable image – disparity - difference – variation in light. As photographers, light is the force that feeds us, it is an intermediary between the tactile physical dimension of subject and its loss of this dimension in a visual representation.

For centuries, light has intrigued artists. While painters use various strategies to simulate light photographers work directly with the source. For photographers variations in the quality, colour, intensity and direction of light are the essence of their medium - a rich, thick pigment in a tube waiting to be squeezed out. When we look to the history of photography, light has been used not only to reveal a subject but as subject in itself.

Fox Talbot’s statement to the Royal Society on 31 January 1839 ... “I do not profess to have perfected an art but to have commenced one, the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain. I only claim to have based this art on a secure foundation." suggests the boundaries of the medium may always be open.

Besides the photographs we produce, light feeds an inimitable force.

In this statement - “Now - light where it exists - can exert an action, and in certain circumstances does exert one sufficient to cause changes in material bodies”. Fox Talbot 1834 - he suggests there are processes with even greater gravity than the potent photographic medium we take for granted. This carefully worded statement is beyond both Fox Talbot the artist and scientist – it is all encompassing - it steps beyond the Art he helped invent, and references material bodies greater than thin sheets of film or paper.

Of course a greater gravity is photosynthesis - the utilization of light by plants to expand their cells and grow into the most extraordinary forms we often take for granted. The elegance of the photosynthetic process is veiled by the visual – the diversity of textures, forms, colours etc. they have evolved to take. There are structures behind the facade sense of beauty in nature - it is plants that are responsible for all the food we eat, many of the natural resources we consume and the processes that keep the planet sustained.

While finely crafted photographs encompass an inspiring aesthetic sense of beauty - the subtle delicacy of tones in a silver gelatin print, the vibrant rich colours of C-types and Cibachrome , the seductive velvet of pigment prints etc. - plants and photosynthesis are consummate in elegance, grace, and style - the process is simply inexplicable in its delicacy, intricacy and wonder.

Surprisingly, the process of photosynthesis, where by plants utilize the energy from the sun to grow is not dissimilar to the way silver halide particles grow when exposed to light and are then developed. The ancients worshiped light and the life it brought; they understood the relationship of light from the sun, the seasons and the relationship with plants. For them the summer solstice was time when light reached a zenith - the winter solstice referenced the azimuth.

Archimedes first noted aspects of the pigmentation change in plant tissue due to exposure to sunlight and made the first reference to both photosynthesis and the idea of marks (images) formed through light – photography. Since then both photosynthesis and light have been the centre of much speculative and scientific investigation.

The exquisite form, structure, pattern and texture of plants as subject matter have fascinated photographers since the invention of the medium. The book, Flora Photographica by William A. Ewing, presents stunning tribute of plant images by Ansel Adams, Eugene Atget, Hippolyte Bayard, Cecil Beaton, Julia Margaret Cameron, William Henry Fox Talbot, Lee Friedlander, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Paul Outerbridge, George Platt Lynes, Lucas Samaras, Edwin Smith, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek – to name a few.

Like the photographic medium, photographs of plants speak of universality – they evoke a response in people that cuts across the politics of human constructs. From, Fox Talbot’s simple but delicate salt prints of leaves in 1838, though the global archetypes of Imogen Cunnigham’s sensual forms of the 1940s, to the more recent and local work by Silvi Glattauer and Julie Millowick, plants are an omnipresent subject. Glattauer’s works are “metamorphic studies of plants investigating notions of beauty in those transient epochs between life and death”. Millowick’s photograms, evocative and ghostlike, explore the vestiges of abandoned colonial gardens. As subject, plants remain ever elusive and intriguing.

In fact, plants are in themselves photographs. The largest photosensitive emulsion that we know of is actually the planet itself. The fabric of intricate foliage which covers areas of the globe is an ever developing image on the surface of the planet - a giant photographic abstraction. With my eye peering from the window of an aircraft high above the ground, through the hazy atmosphere, the patterns of foliage across the land evoke a sense of a planet dreaming – the mosaic is in effect giant diffuse photogram grown from the seeds of evolution. Sometimes - it reminds me of how Tristan Tzara described Man Ray's photograms - “ Projections .. of objects that dream and talk in their sleep”.

Perhaps our forests images of our planet dreaming?

However during the past century this organic emulsion has suffered a huge human intervention, like a thick sticky dust layer, and deep gouged scratches on the most perfect negative, the biotic emulsion of the planet has been damaged.

Has the dream turned to nightmare?

I began gardening about the same time I started taking photographs – these two activities have always occupied a large part of my life and psyche – I approach both with passion. Ever in convergence - over a period of 28 years the activities developed from distant star-like points. Unlike the converging perspective lines in a photograph there was no vanishing point where they faded into an unseen dimension. In 1996 there was a collision – a realization that to two activities were actually one in the same. They both utilize light to create marks.

I began using the photosensitive nature of plants to create images on the leaves of Bromeliad plants. Achema, Neoregelia, Virisea, Tillandsia - bromeliads are a family of South American plants - many are epiphytes, and for me they represent sustainability. Many use the branches of trees for support but take no nourishment from them, they have developed a special cell that allows them to absorb water into the leaf structure – some form vases that hold a reservoir of water and provide environments for other creatures.

Before quantum chemistry there was the mystique of alchemy. Through the periodic table, and methodical practice the new science proposed to define materials, causes and effects. But technology is a global religion that drives an arrogant science. Inadvertently we release chemicals into the environment and do not fully understand their effect. Like alchemy, there is still a sense of vagueness in what we do.

Since 1989, my work had involved camera less photography - photograms. With objects laid directly onto the emulsion, the process is seductive, the results always a disclosure of an inherent energy the objects possesses that can never be seen with the naked eye. My work progressed from small silver gelatin prints, through huge colour works to free form alternative processes works where the emulsion was painted on as motifs.

In a somewhat similar manner to the photogram I worked directly onto the plants photosensitive emulsion – I masked off areas of the plant tissue with opaque tape in the form of a series of alchemic symbols. By incorporating the vibrancy of the plants inflorescent cycle at flowering time and exposing the plant to sunlight for up to 4 months, vibrant photosynthetic images with vivid greens and reds were created in the very tissue of the plants. However once the tape was removed the action that formed the image caused the cells react again. The image faded into obscurity and the only reference was the photographs I took of these ephemeral photosynthetic inscriptions.

The work transmutes from photographs of plants to plants as photograph.